Transnational Queer Histories
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Edited by:
Bodie A. Ashton
The series Transnational Queer Histories aims at encouraging queer historical studies, defined at their broadest, to forge new cross-disciplinary paths and pioneer innovative intersectional approaches. It seeks works that deal with transgender, non-binary, gender nonconforming, and intersex identities, as well as historical bisexuality, pansexuality, asexuality, polyamory, aromanticism, and other aspects of gender and sexuality that fall outside a classically-understood normative identification, and situates them within a critical framework of engagement across race, religion, culture, class, society, and other intersections of historical marginalisation.
The series welcomes both monographs and edited volumes in English and German, and is edited by Bodie Ashton and Jonah I. Garde.
Avidsory Board:
Yener Bayramoğlu
Samuel Clowes Huneke
Jennifer Evans
Tiffany Florvil
Onni Gust
Anna Hájková
Martin Lücke
Sabrina Mittermeier
Katie Sutton
Sébastien Tremblay
Topics
The book offers unique insights into the politics and practice of commercial sex in the early 2000s through the eyes of male sex worker, Stefan Hülsmann, aka Marc-of-Frankfurt. It is based on sources and documents from his archive in the years 2000 to 2013. Hülsmann was a sex worker and sex workers’ rights activist in Germany and Europe between 2000 and 2013, before dying in 2017 by suicide. He left his belongings and archives to the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft. This book explores this historically unique archive of a male sex worker and activist and makes it accessible to scholars, students and activists through introductory texts and a selection of original sources. The book centers the professional and political work of Hülsmann and the creation of his sex worker persona Marc-of-Frankfurt. Sources include meticulously drafted business plans, diary entries of paid sex encounters, drawings and mind maps about Marc’s views about himself as a sex worker. Chapters tackle subjects including sex workers’ engagement with the law, especially, the legal reform of prostitution laws with the Prostitutionsgesetz (ProstG) in 2001, as well as Marc’s ideas and ideals of professionalization post legal change. Further chapters consider Marc’s efforts at "communicating sex work" and his activism within German and European sex workers’ networks, his efforts at creating a network of male sex workers and his intense activity on the sex worker online forum sexworker.at.
A Badge of Injury is a contribution to both the fields of queer and global history. It analyses gay and lesbian transregional cultural communication networks from the 1970s to the 2000s, focusing on the importance of National Socialism, visual culture, and memory in the queer Atlantic. Provincializing Euro-American queer history, it illustrates how a history of concepts which encompasses the visual offers a greater depth of analysis of the transfer of ideas across regions than texts alone would offer. It also underlines how gay and lesbian history needs to be reframed under a queer lens and understood in a global perspective. Following the journey of the Pink Triangle and its many iterations, A Badge of Injury pinpoints the roles of cultural memory and power in the creation of gay and lesbian transregional narratives of pride or the construction of the historical queer subject. Beyond a success story, the book dives into some of the shortcomings of Euro-American queer history and the power of the negative, writing an emancipatory yet critical story of the era.
The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax explores the vulnerability of educated and politically engaged Westerners to Progressive Orientalism, a form of Orientalism embedded within otherwise egalitarian and anti-imperialist Western thought. Early in the Arab Spring, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog appeared. Its author claimed to be Amina Arraf, a Syrian American lesbian Muslim woman living in Damascus. After the blog’s went viral in April 2011, Western journalists electronically interviewed Amina, magnifying the blog’s claim that the Syrian uprising was an ethnically and religiously pluralist movement anchored in an expansive sense of social solidarity. However, after a post announced that the secret police had kidnapped Amina, journalists and activists belatedly realized that Amina did not exist and Thomas “Tom” MacMaster, a forty-year-old straight white American man and peace activist living and studying medieval history in Scotland was the blog’s true author. MacMaster’s hoax succeeded by melding his and his audience’s shared political and cultural beliefs into a falsified version of the Syrian Revolution that validated their views of themselves as anti-racist and anti-imperialist progressives by erasing real Syrians.
Watch our book talk with the author Andrew Orr here: https://youtu.be/MnaaxlO6Vuw
